Pages

Sep 11, 2011

Architecture of Consequences | Arkitektura e Pasojave

Anticipating the 10th anniversary of 9/11, I wanted to ask how the concept of democracy and freedom has changed in the cities, this past decade? What is the architecture of consequences when the city itself becomes a technology of war; when it becomes a geopolitical landscape, a materialistic organization of territory?

Saskia Sassen, the well-known sociologist and urban researcher has written extensively on the subject of urban warfare and I'd like to share a few notes on her understanding of the city as technology of war.

When the City Itself Becomes a Technology of War.

Over and over history shows us the limits of power. The urbanizing of war points to the limits of power, and perhaps, the weight of weak orders such as the human rights regime. This is built into the asymmetric nature of modern warfare in urban settings. Asymmetric wars are partial, intermittent and lack clear endings.

The center no longer holds. It is hard to find a balance.

When great powers fail in self-restraint we have what Mearsheimer has called the tragedy of great powers. It would seem that unilateral decisions by the greater power are not the only source of restraint: in an increasingly interdependent world, the most powerful countries find themselves restrained through multiple interdependencies.

Cities can function as a type of weak regime that can obstruct and temper the destructive capacity of the superior military power, yet another component for systemic survival in a world where several countries have the capacity to destroy the planet.

We need to open up powerlessness (city) into a variable: at one end, it is elementary and can be understood simply as the absence of power. But at the other end, powerlessness becomes complex and hence a far more ambiguous condition.There is a direct dependence of everyday life in cities on massive infrastructures and on institutional-level supports for most people – apartment buildings, hospitals, vast sewage systems, water purification systems, vast underground transport systems, whole electric grids dependent on computerized management vulnerable to breakdowns.

There exists a latent threat to this weak regime, a latent power to the powerlessness.

New Realities

The urbanizing of war and its consequences can explain why cities are losing older capacities to transform potential conflicts into the civic. In the last two centuries, the traditional foundation for the civic in its European conception has largely been the ‘civilizing’ of bourgeois capitalism; this corresponds to the triumph of liberal democracy as the political system of the bourgeoisie. Today, capitalism is a different formation, and so is the political system of the new global elites. These developments raise a question about what might be the new equivalent of what in the past was the civic.

The ascendance of cities as a strategic front line space for major global governance challenges is the new (public) format, which shows an increasingly urban articulation of territory for a wide range of processes: from war to global corporate capital to the increasing use of urban space to make political claims.

What is the politics of urban identity? How the concept of democracy and freedom has changed in the cities? Parks, boulevards, monuments, and other cultural and civic properties were designed to be public, open, and welcoming. Now they have concrete barriers and are fences. A symbol of global governance. Is the architecture of consequences now, an architecture of fear, caution, or plain bureaucratic?